Re: SPI violating bylaws and Debian constitution
regarding the use of SPI to accept donations...
if you are going to provide this service you are going to need
a few policies in place first. There is a bunch of paperwork
to deal with and also there might be some guidelines to determine
which projects that SPI would act as "fiscal sponsor" for.
Usually organizations that provide fiscal sponsorship will take
about 8% of a grant and use that for administrative costs. So if
SPI received $100,000 total in pass thru donations in a year, it
would be able to use $8,000 to pay for accounting costs, bank fees,
filing fees, whatever.
By the way, we are working on a project to create collaborative
directories for social change activists on the web. For example
we have a directory in a prototype stage at www.agitate.net/wfc,
which is a directory of social change listservs. This is a Php/Mysql
application that will become open source as soon as a few more
features are added.
It would have been nice if SPI was able to help us in the first
six months of this year when we did not have tax exempt status.
Fortunatlely we got our own status in July, but if we had been
able to work with SPI earlier we might have received additional
grants.
-rich
Free projects are not in need of computing resources any more as they were
before sourceforge came about. They are, however, still in need of an
organization that can handle donations and legal issues if required. This
is a hole that SPI is also designed to fill, and I think that it can do this.
The public is aware of the internet in general, but work could still be done
in developing countries. Try not to think too US specific... for example a
program where corporations donate everything from a 386 up to get a tax
break and these PCs are installed with Linux to be a cheap mail/web
interface and sent to developing countries. SPI can accept these donations
since its non-profit.
Organizers' Collaborative PO Box 400897, Cambridge MA 02140
(617) 776-6176 org-c@organizenow.net www.organizenow.net
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